Any Empire, and particularly this guileful post-modern ruling-elite corporate/financial Empire which controls our country behind the facade of its two-party 'Vichy' sham of democracy, is entirely focused on unjustified hierarchy, inequality, and absolute power over the political-economics of a society --- and the world, if they can keep getting away with it.
As I have written extensively in Op-Ed News and elsewhere, traditional Empires have been overt in using 'war booty' for acquiescence of the populace to hierarchical elitist EMPIRE. But today pride or hubris in being a citizen of the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Nazi Empire, or the Soviet Empire no longer does it for any but naive and arrogant fools, and thus today's only 21st century surviving Empire must be more guileful --- and thus the massive unjust inequality of Empire must be defended differently than merely sharing a little war booty.
However, economic facts belie the "Illusions of Empire" (Hedges) that our disguised 21st century Empire propagandizes:
Economists' 'gold standard' measurement of inequality in a society is called the GINI Coefficient of Income Inequality --- in which on a simple scale of 0 to 1 a society is measured in terms of 0 being perfectly equal income, and 1.0 being all income held by one person. Based on this universally accepted measure of comparing countries the following table shows:
All 'social democracies' of Europe and Japan --- 0.23 to 0.31
Russia and Communist China --- 0.41 and 0.46
à ‚¬ËœOur' United States of America --- 0.49 (and rising fast)
Mugabe's plutocratic dictatorship of Zimbabwe --- 0.53
[Our own CIA's country casebook warns that any society with a GINI Coefficient above 0.45 is in danger of civil unrest and revolution.]
Therefore, for the last Empire on earth to survive it must guilefully con its citizens into believing something other than the facts about their woeful status of vast economic inequality (as Thomas Frank documented about Kansans).
The way in which the ruling-elite corporate/financial Empire (nominally headquartered in our country) accomplishes this distraction and illusion can be understood by looking at the concepts of Alfred P. Sloan.
The historic propaganda genius of Sloan's famous market segmentation of GM cars was not that it institutionalized a hierarchical system of supposedly deserved prestige of cars by income level in our 'political-economic' system --- but that it began the shift of the entire US society toward accepting the monetization of the very definition of 'equality' within our whole political-economic existence. In other words, the monetization of 'democracy' itself, in order to hide an 'Empire' system morphing and posing as democracy.
The unfortunate result of Sloan's idea ("for good or evil", as Keynes would say) was that the American people have become anesthetized to the meaning of 'democracy' and have had been force-feed the real meaning of capitalist 'Empire' to replace the meaning of democracy.
Thus, it is without shame or argument that George W. Bush could publicly applaud America as the leader of 'capitalist democracy' whatever that moron meant by this oxymoron.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
